Transcript of remarks made by John Podesta, former Chief of Staff to
President Bill Clinton

I thought I might start with the famous line with Admiral Stockdale "Who am I?
What am I doing here?" Or Maybe I should start with who I am not? I have actually
never been followed by a tractor beam. I have never been bathed in the grow of the white
light coming from an object in the sky. I certainly have never been 'taken.' Why my
obsession with. . .for some of you was well known while I was in the White House with the
X-files during my time there. It earned me the honorary title of the "first
fan," I think I always understood the difference between fact and fiction. So I guess
you could call me a skeptic.

But I am skeptical about many things, including the notion that government always knows
best, and that the people can not be trusted with the truth. That's why I have dedicated
three decades of my life, both in private practice including my work on the Senate
Judiciary Committee, and my work at the White House to the fundamental principle of
protecting openness in government. Harold Cross, for those of you who know who he is - was
actually the founder of the Freedom of Information Act - the father of the Freedom of
Information Act. He was a fell know journalism professor at the University of Missouri. He
said, "The right to speak, and the right to print, without the right to know, are
pretty empty."

So I believe that the notion of open government Freedom of Information - the
fundamental tenets of the Freedom of Information Act are really part and parcel of our
first amendment rights. I think it is worth going back and reminding all of you just
exactly what those tenets really are, that form the basis of that act.

They are that disclosure is the general rule and not the exception. That all
individuals have equal rights of access. That the burden is on the government to justify
the withholding of the document, not on the person requesting it, and that individuals
improperly denied access to documents have the right seek conjunctive relief in the
courts.

That's why I am here today, to add my voice to Bonnie (Hammer), Leslie (Kean) and Lee
(Helfrich). I think it's time to open the books on questions that have remained in the
dark on the question of government investigations of UFOs. Its time to find out what the
truth really is that's out there. We ought to do it really because its right. We ought to
do it because the American people quite frankly can handle the truth, and we ought to do
it because its the law. Let me explain what I mean by that.

In 1995, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12958 which sets tough standards for
classifying documents, and led to an unprecedented effort to declassify millions of pages
from our Nation's diplomatic and national security history.

Before President Clinton signed that Executive Order, a tiny minority of classified
documents - only 5% had fixed classification dates. Since the signing of that order now,
more than 50% of those documents are marked for declassification in 10 years or less.
Perhaps I think even more significantly during the five years that the executive order was
in place, its policy resulted in the declassification of what were 800 million pages of
historically valuable records, with the prospect of many hundreds of millions of more
being declassified in the next few years.

To give you a bit of a comparison of that. In the previous 15 years the government had
declassified a total of 188 million pages. So I think that was a singular accomplishment
of the Clinton administration for further generations. Our history books will rely on the
information contained in those declassified documents. Scholars, historians, journalists,
and everyday researchers around the world, not just in the United States will explore the
past and help guide our future.

But the work is not done. That Order required the automatic declassification of records
that are 25 years or older, subject to a very narrow set of exceptions, and I want to just
note two of those, and as an introduction to Lee, who is going to talk about the Freedom
of Information Act that has been requested. One is that they reveal the automatic
declassification rule does not apply if it reveals the identity of a confidential human
source - and I underline the word human. I don't think that we are talking about that in
the cases that ought to be looked at, reviewed, and declassified.

The other is they would curiously or demonstrably undermine ongoing diplomatic
activities of the United States, and unless we have ongoing diplomatic activities with
people who are extraterrestrials that I'm unaware of, I don't think that exception doesn't
apply either. So there are these cases in which documents haven't been made available to
the American public. The American public as Bonnie noted is quite skeptical about the fact
that the government won't make them available for public inspection. These are records
that are more than 25 years old. The ought to be declassified. They ought to be released,
and we ought to be able to see for ourselves what is included in those.

This note this morning in the Washington Post. Again a Novak story, that notes
that our government does not always reveal the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth, and even though the highest leaders of our government don't always tell the facts
just as they are. That's why the Freedom of Information is so important, and the
information that is included in the request that Lee will discuss. It is so critical to be
put in front of the American public so that they can make their own judgement about the
conduct of the program of investigation as well as the underlying facts that the Air Force
and other discover. So with that let me turn it over to Lee, and let her discuss the
request that is being made.